Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–36
ASPATURIAN: Why did you write rather than pick up the phone?
TOMBRELLO: I wanted to explain the whole case carefully, and I wanted to do it in such a way
that they all saw exactly the same stuff.
ASPATURIAN: OK.
TOMBRELLO: But clearly they all got together and decided they couldn’t fix some things. I was
clearly not ever going to be funded in nuclear physics or nuclear astrophysics, but I could be
funded in materials science, where some of this stuff had been heading over the past few years.
And they basically said, “Hey, it’s up to him to make it work.”
ASPATURIAN: Meaning you.
TOMBRELLO: They said, “We can make sure he gets money from the NSF.” The materials
science people were looking for people with fresh ideas and came up with money. That solved
it. I had a separate place from Kellogg. I had money to get on the accelerator. It wasn’t a lot of
money, but it was enough. And so things began to stabilize and actually began to grow. I began
to get more funding from the NSF. I guess there was money from the DOE [Department of
Energy], money from a whole bunch of things, lots of little grants put together.
It was an accounting nightmare, but, you know, I’m actually pretty good at accounting,
and you can make it work. In fact, you can make it work better because it was so confused—
Caltech’s financial system was garbage, at best. It’s not that you could steal money—although
maybe people did. But you could move money around in creative ways and get things done that
you couldn’t otherwise have gotten done.
This goes on for a little while. But then, by late 1986, suddenly some of these grants are
not being renewed, and I’d built up the number of grad students. I had a lot of grad students and
a lot going on. So a couple of things happened. First thing was, this building we’re sitting in
now, Sloan Annex, had been a warehouse for the great central shop, which is over where Downs-
Lauritsen [Laboratory of Physics] is. I had seized it when I was running Kellogg and gradually
lost it as things narrowed in funding. So then Development and Safety moved into this building,
and it was a mess. But I think probably sometime in ’86 I said to Ed [Edward C.] Stone
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